Embrace Wikimania with your editing skills

As preparations continue for the first Wikimania conference in sub-Saharan Africa in Cape Town (18 to 22 July), a key focus will be on increasing more regional contribution to the world’s largest free, collaboratively-built online encyclopedia.

Wikimedia sites are read about 15 billion times a month globally, however, only a small portion of volunteer Wikipedia editors come from Asia, Africa, and Latin America combined.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia in any of its almost 300 different language versions, including Swahili, Hausa, Amharic, Arabic and Afrikaans versions.

“To achieve knowledge equity we need to have more voices represented in our community. This is why we are creating an inclusive environment for people from all over the world to contribute knowledge in a way that considers custom, language, access to bandwidth, and more,” said Ellie Young, conference organiser for Wikimania.

In South Africa, Afrikaans and isiZulu are the most active language Wikipedias other than English.

“If you are passionate about a specific topic or piece of local history, or if you would like to see more articles in your own language, register and start making your contributions.

“The only way we are going to shift the content bias is by adding content that represents a more diverse user base,” said Douglas Scott, president of the Wikimedia Chapter of South Africa.

With over five million articles already on English language Wikipedia, Scott said that more African contributors can get involved by creating an account on Wikipedia and testing out different ways to edit, whether it’s fixing a grammatical error or adding a citation to an existing article, creating a new article, or asking other volunteer editors for support in reviewing a draft article you created.

Things to bear in mind:

• Articles on Wikipedia need to have verifiable references and sources. This means that facts must be drawn from recognisable publications and institutions.

• A great way for more African contributors to get involved is to join a WikiProject around specific areas of interest. WikiProjects consist of groups of contributors who work together to create and improve articles about a specific topic on Wikipedia.

Additional Resources:

• For a general guide on how to get started on Wikipedia go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Welcoming_committee/Welcome_to_Wikipedia

• Follow the conference on #Wikimania2018 as well as on Twitter https://twitter.com/wikimania

• For more information about the conference and to register please visit www.wikimania2018.com